There is to be found a rest 'for all who come.' It is a sure port after the shipwrecks of the fourths and fifths. The traveller need work no more; he has laboured faithfully, let him enter into the joy of his lord. He returns one holidays having gained his second eleven colours. Paternal pride is flattered, and the spirit of welcome is only partially relaxed by the accompanying report. About a week later the following conversation takes place over a glass of port.
Son: I say, father, don't you think all these classics are rather a waste of time?
Father: Well, I don't know, my boy. I did them myself, you know.
Son: Of course, father, of course; but things were a bit different then, and besides you were so much better at them than I am.
Father: Oh, well, if you put it like that, my boy, well, perhaps——
Son: You see, father, I thought it would be rather a good idea for me to read history.
Father: History, my boy, whatever for?
Son: Well, I was thinking of taking up politics, father, and anyway, history scholarships are awfully easy to get. That ass, Kenneth, got one—you know, the fellow in the School House with the yellow hair. If you'd just drop a line to Chief, father, I'm sure he would be only too glad....
One more pilgrim has arrived at Mecca.
The higher up the school one goes, the less work one does. After a few terms the habit of work is lost, and the only real diligence is displayed by that melancholy type of scholar who is trained like a pet Pomeranian.
This is not an ideal apprenticeship for life. It starts a boy with an entirely false idea of the position that his work should occupy in his life. I do not wish to seem parsonic, but, if the experience of practically every big man that has ever lived means anything to us, we do know that a man's happiness, or unhappiness, depends in the main on whether his employment is congenial to him. Work is the finest antidote to boredom. And a public school boy has not realised this by the time he is on the threshold of his career. He does not consider that the choice of his career should be the expression of his temperament. He drifts into the most accessibly remunerative job. He brings to it no enthusiasm.
The trouble is that school life lasts too long and is far too jolly. Six years is a long time. A boy of thirteen can hardly be expected to realise that it is only a prelude. The years pass so happily, the pursuit of ambition is so engrossing that he has no time to consider whether the prizes he is winning have any lasting value. As the new boy he longs to be captain of the school: and, having set himself a task, he does not shrink from the contest. School life is so vast, so varied, so many-coloured that it would be difficult for a boy to relinquish his hold upon the ambition that lies close to him in favour of the shadowy ambitions of the life that lies beyond it. School life is too big a pedestal for the statue that is to be placed on it. It dwarfs what it should present. The boy finds on leaving school that an entirely different technique is required. It is not that the standards are changed, but the whole manner of life is altered.
His school career was divided neatly into stages. He could at any moment consult a house list and see how he was progressing on the road to authority. At such a period he should have reached the Fifth table. If he were one day to get into the Fifteen, he should by his sixteenth birthday have got his house cap. Everything was mapped out. The rungs of the ladder were labelled. Colt's Cap, House Cap, Seconds, Firsts, Fourth Form, Fifth Form, Sixth.
In business he finds no such ladder. His abilities are placed upon the open market. He is fighting an intangible foe. He has to come to terms with himself. He feels that he is driving into the void. He also finds that he has to rearrange his scale of values. Athletic distinction is not greatly prized in Wall Street, and the young man who, when asked to present his qualifications, remarks that his batting average was over thirty, without a single not-out score to help it, is likely to receive a rude shock. I spent a few months before I went to Sandhurst in the Inns of Court O.T.C. (a corps that had, by that time, ceased to be composed of ex-public school men), and it was a blow to discover that the fact that I had been in my school eleven and fifteen made not the slightest impression on any of the N.C.O.'s.
It may be that a readjustment of one's standards is a healthy experience. But that is hardly the attitude that officials could safely adopt. The public school system is supposed to produce trained citizens, who are in harmony with their environment. And that is exactly what the public school boy is not. He tries to tackle life with the scale of values that he learnt to apprehend at school. And it is not an easy task. Some, indeed, never accomplish it. They never readjust themselves. They surround themselves with old friends, revisit their old schools, endeavour to recapture the old atmosphere. They regret vaguely that something has passed. Like Jurgen, they return in quest of their youth, but the distorted shadow of Sereda prevents them from entering completely their former selves. In The Harrovians Arnold Lunn makes two of his characters discuss this question.